Hello from my office. One of the reasons I started this again was so I could spend my lunch breaks writing and eating a brownbag lunch, instead of spending $7 and half of my break in pursuit of 600 grams of fat and some bread. I’m hoping the word count for this project will go up as my weight goes down.
I feel like I’m going to jinx it if I say it, but I started working on my third book last night. I got a good 5000 words down last night, and a rudimentary outline, and I would’ve wrote another 5000 except it was 3 in the morning and I had to be at work today. I have a good feeling about this one, and I’m not sure where it’s going, but I think it’s a cool project. I feel stupid talking about it in such vague terms, so I’ll stop for a bit.
I do have this weird feeling about starting a book like this. Both of my other books were conceived in 1995, which seems like forever ago. Summer Rain was born in an era where I was killing myself over getting a book started, and I had a great short story that begged to be turned into a full-length novel. Rumored to Exist began as a writer’s block exercise while in Boston on a trade show visit, using Bill Perry’s semi-stolen Dell laptop. I don’t remember the moment I decided to take that short story about the summer of 1992 and turn it into a book – in fact, I didn’t even write it down in my daily journal. I remember starting Rumored – I was in a hotel bar, and some drunken woman from Minnesota was hitting on me with the line “hey, is that a computer?” Starting a new book is like starting a new relationship – there’s so much charged energy, you can’t stop thinking about it, and the future goes from being indeterminate to holding so much promise.
Although this is my third book, it’s also maybe my 10th attempt at a book. So maybe by Friday, all of this will collapse and I’ll be trying to figure out what to do next. Buyer beware.
A shout out to The Meyhem Project, now posting daily again.